For the Birds

Born in Fresno, they will die in Fresno and in between spend a short, sexless, gluttonous existence at a mountain ranch with 56,000 feathered friends that look, smell--and will, ultimately, taste--pretty much the same.

This is life on Ventura County’s only turkey farm. And if you’re one of turkey rancher Gary Lee’s 9,700 remaining fowl, it is almost over.

“A short holiday in paradise,” is how the 45-year-old Lee describes their stay. “Turkeys live for the moment.”

As well they might, when the unknowing focus of their 14- to 16-week life span is serving as a Thanksgiving Day entree complemented by cranberry sauce and corn bread stuffing.

The cycle has repeated itself with the regularity of the holidays on the 75-acre ranch, which is seven miles south of the Kern County line in the Lockwood Valley.

It all began in 1919, when Lee’s grandfather, a World War I flying ace, raised his first poults.

There are few surprises for either turkey or farmer, which is just the way Lee likes it in a mathematically-precise business with razor-thin profit margins.

When you’ve got almost $500,000 worth of birds, you don’t want them stressed out, which would produce less healthy poultry.

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Year in, year out, Lee is contracted to raise nearly 400,000 turkeys--two flocks annually in Ventura County and another four at a second Lee Ranch his brother operates near Fresno.

The turkeys’ owner is actually privately held Zacky Farms, the state’s second-largest poultry company, which relies on Lee for about 5% of their annual production, said Duane Herrick, Zacky’s assistant general manager.

It is a revolving cycle short on emotional attachment, long on financial accountability, but not completely bereft of humor.

“He’s a major player,” Herrick said of Lee’s partnership with Zacky Farms, while downplaying the relationship between farmer and product. “When you raise 400,000 [turkeys], you run out of names after a while.”

A day after they are born, the first of about 58,600 Nicholas broad-breasted whites start arriving at Lee Ranch from a Fresno hatchery at the rate of 20,000 at day, 100 to a box. This begins around the second week of July.

They are placed in 95-degree brooder pens in one of four 350-foot-long houses for the first five to six weeks of their metronomic life to protect them from the vagaries of a California spring at the ranch’s 5,500-foot altitude.

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After that, it’s outdoors to one of nine different pens where the young turkeys soon learn to retrieve a grain-based mixture of pellets and mash from 450-foot-long feed lines.

Lee Ranch is one of the handful in the state that has eschewed what would be a $1-million investment in indoor ranching equipment, instead raising turkeys out- doors for the last 10 to 11 weeks of their lives.

Coyotes, deterred by an electric fence that discharges a jolt akin to touching a sparkplug, are not a problem.

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Carnivorous owls, especially at first, contribute to the flock’s 4.5% mortality rate. So do the birds themselves.

In a flock that is 99% female, the unfortunate blue-headed toms are especially prone to being literally henpecked to death, despite beaks shortened by lasers at the hatchery.

“Hens are harder to get along with,” allows the philosophical Lee, speaking more from experience than chauvinism.

Still, it is a largely monotonous life.

The hens cluck in alarm--only toms actually gobble--when an unfamiliar visitor approaches, yet gather by the fence for a closer look.

“They’re real gregarious,” Lee said. “If you get one coming this way, the whole lot will follow them.”

The curiosity and herding nature is handy when Lee’s black and white border collie Spad, named after the French airplane his grandfather flew in the war, must occasionally move the birds from place to place.

The only excitement Lee’s turkeys experience on a regular basis is from falling elm leaves dotted about their pens, which send birds rushing and white feathers flying.

There are certainly no biological urges to divert them, which is probably just as well given the male-female ratio of Lee’s flock.

“Turkeys are incapable of reproducing themselves naturally,” said Bruce Charlton, an expert in turkey diseases with UC Davis. “They’ve been genetically bred to have large breast meat and that’s left them physically incapable of being able to reproduce. They have to be bred artificially.”

Lee’s turkeys have almost gobbled their last meal.

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By Sunday at the latest, the birds will become a statistic--just some more of the 22.5 million turkeys produced annually in California. And Lee will look forward to the holidays as much as anyone.

“It’s not what you call a likable animal,” said Lee, who said turkeys are best appreciated when they’re a crispy golden brown. “I try not to think about a live turkey when I’m eating my Thanksgiving dinner.”